Massimo Introvigne tells the tale of two Maoist collapses, the first as prologue to the second, the story related by Julie Pagis in the new book Le prophète rouge. Enquête sur la révolution, le charisme et la domination (The Red Prophet: An Investigation of Revolution, Charisma, and Domination) (“A Micro-Totalitarian Maoist Group in France: Julie Pagis’s Le Prophète Rouge,” Bitter Winter, January 20, 2025).
In China, the decades-long Maoism of the actual Mao Zedong did not collapse even after he died in 1976, although it did undergo major changes (e.g., in the direction of less mass slaughter).
The Maoism that Introvigne is talking about is that of persons inspired by Mao to try their own little Maoist revolutions.
Brandirali
The first Maoist was Aldo Brandirali, whom Introvigne eventually met long after coming across some of his followers. They worshiped Brandirali as well as Mao.
“His portraits were ubiquitous in the group, and its devotees could be found in the entrance hall of my university chanting ‘We follow Comrade Brandirali’ and ‘Stalin, Mao, Brandirali!’ I learned…that some of them lived communally with Brandirali and that he celebrated their (not legally valid) marriages in the name of Chairman Mao—and of himself.”
This Maoist society continued for only a few years after Brandirali stopped leading it. He met a priest, converted to Catholicism, and “spectacularly [changed] his political ideas as he went from Mao to a totally different charismatic leader, Silvio Berlusconi, for whose party he became an influential member of Milan’s city administration in the 21st century.”
Berlusconi was a businessman and three-time prime minister of Italy who founded the conservative political party Forza Italia.
Until now, Introvigne had thought that this “micro-group, functioning as it was like a Maoist new religious movement, was unique, at least in continental Europe….”
But French sociologist Julie Pagis has proved him wrong.
Fernandez
Pagis’s Red Prophet “describes a group very similar to Brandirali’s Italian Maoists and operating in the same decade, the 1970s, in an ex-convent in Clichy, in the banlieue [suburbs] of Paris. Its founder was a Spanish laborer called Fernando Fernandez…. When in 1981 he decided to close the group, which had been formed in 1971, Fernando did not convert to Catholicism nor to the political right like Brandirali. He disappeared into comparative obscurity in Spain, where he became a shipowner, developed alcohol problems, had a serious car accident at the end of the 1980s, and died of cancer in 2008 at age 76….
“It does not appear that Fernando was ever able to self-criticize himself and the cult of his personality he had imposed on his followers as Brandirali did. Otherwise, there are obvious similarities between the two groups. Both tried a Maoist experiment in communal living; both told their intellectual members that, in a replica of the Cultural Revolution, they should become ‘embedded’ with the people, finding employment as factory workers; and in both cases the leader exerted a strong control on the group.”
Fernandez “controlled the lives, the sexuality, the children of the members. He justified with ideological pretexts his own sexual escapades and mistreatment of his female partners. And he created, along the style of the Cultural Revolution in China, a pervasive and paranoid system of self-criticism and of identification of members of the group as ‘class enemies’ to be punished. The latter were persuaded themselves that they suffered of the ‘illness’ of ‘revisionism’ and needed Fernando to be ‘cured.’ In the end, however, the pressure was simply too much and the group collapsed.”
Not Maoist enough
The two “micro-groups” collapsed for different reasons but also, in part, for the same reason: they could not reenact the Maoism of Mao. They were not army-backed party-states in control of whole societies with the power and will to keep a totalitarian scam going indefinitely.
Moreover, the groups either could not or would not adopt the organizational means of surviving indefinitely as private cults that at some point can no longer rely on the founding charismatic leader: the structures of continuity and control more or less successfully adopted by such cults or quasi-cults as scientology and other religions or sects.
